Tiananmen’s Wake

A novel of hope and cynicism.

To Westerners, the students at Tiananmen seemed united, but Ma Jian’s novel portrays them as egotistical and fractious.Credit CATHERINE HENRIETTE/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

It is still not clear how many unarmed civilians the People’s Liberation Army (P.L.A.) killed in Beijing on the night of June 3, 1989, as it sought to expel protestors from Tiananmen Square. The names of the victims, who were officially denounced as “counter-revolutionaries,” were never published. Their relatives are forbidden from mourning them in public. On every anniversary of the massacre, policemen proliferate in the square, quick to extinguish any attempt at honoring the dead and wounded. The massacre cannot even be mentioned in the Chinese media.

This attempt to engineer collective amnesia seems to have worked: some students at Beijing University recently failed to identify the iconic Tiananmen photograph of the young man with the plastic bags confronting tanks. Once famous student leaders—Chai Ling, Li Lu, Wang Dan, Shen Tong, Wu’er Kaixi—went into exile, and several transformed themselves into venture capitalists and hedge funders. To the Chinese, who have been released with miraculous swiftness from the deprivations and traumas of the Mao years into hectic consumerism, struggles for democracy waged in the late nineteen-seventies and eighties seem increasingly remote. As Dai Wei, the comatose but mordantly alert narrator of “Beijing Coma,” the new novel by Ma Jian (translated from the Chinese by Flora Drew; Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $27.50), observes, “No one talks about the Tiananmen protests any more.”

Ma Jian, a former resident of Beijing who was at the Tiananmen protests, now lives in self-imposed exile in London. His narrator, who lingers in a coma for years after being shot in the neck by a stray bullet during the P.L.A.’s crackdown, gives a remarkably detailed, and often only thinly fictionalized, account of the events and their brisk disappearance from Chinese memory. “The struggle of man against power,” Milan Kundera once wrote against a similar backdrop of Communist indoctrination, “is the struggle of memory against forgetting”; and, at nearly six hundred closely printed pages, “Beijing Coma” seems determined to enshrine the strivings of “the Tiananmen Generation.”

Ma Jian writes about China with the obsessiveness of a writer in exile who cares about only one society. There is no doubting his passion and sense of urgency. “We’ve been crushed and silenced,” says a colleague of Dai Wei’s whose legs are trampled under a P.L.A. tank. “If we don’t take a stand now, we will be erased from the history books.” Dai Wei, whose inner life is periodically stimulated by visitors to his sickbed, notes each new diversion—cell phones, e-mail, video disks, anti-Western nationalism, New Age religion, the Olympics—that beguiles his countrymen away from the idealism of 1989. “As society changes, new words and terms keep popping up, such as: sauna, private car ownership, property developer, mortgage and personal instalment loan,” he notes. He watches helplessly as his own decaying body is commodified, his urine used in quack therapy, and his still responsive penis employed by seekers of kinky sex. His hapless mother resorts to selling one of his kidneys to pay for his treatment. Finally, a real-estate developer from Hong Kong demolishes his cramped home during Beijing’s pre-Olympic prettification. In the novel’s Wagnerian finale, the bulldozers of the hustling new China and the tanks of the P.L.A. combine in a frenzy of violence and destruction.

Philip Roth once contrasted, slightly enviously, the American writer, who can say anything he wishes but is usually ignored, with his Eastern Bloc counterpart, who, since nothing is permitted to him, receives respectful attention for everything he writes. China—garishly capitalist but still officially Communist—seems to impose its own peculiar ordeal on writers; they risk the state’s malevolence without exercising any great moral or political influence in their easily distracted society. “Beijing Coma” is unlikely to be published on the Chinese mainland (though editions printed in Hong Kong and Taiwan will probably be pirated there), and will be read mostly by readers outside China.

Some of its more pungent criticisms are likely to be lost on the non-Chinese reader. To Westerners, the students at Tiananmen may have given an impression of a solid and energetic consensus against dictatorship and for democracy, but they were an egotistical and fractious lot, riven by disagreements over tactics and money. These schisms widened during the years of exile as leaders blamed each other for the failure of the protests. Ma Jian retraces these recriminations over hundreds of pages, closely (and controversially) approximating actual events and real-life personalities. Nailing down the differences between the respective stances of the Hunger Strike Headquarters, the Beijing Students’ Federation, and the Provincial Students’ Federation is as important to him as evoking the scent of Dai Wei’s girlfriends.

The novel’s style feels more familiar when, following much dissident literature from the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, it mixes gritty realism with absurdist satire. In one memorable scene, Dai Wei is fellated by a horny visitor while the new nationalists of Beijing lustily celebrate Hong Kong’s return to the Chinese motherland. Writers in Communist countries inevitably focus on what Ivan Klíma once called the “intriguing plots offered by the totalitarian system”—“the humiliation of man, life based on lies and pretenses”—and State repression and terror also tend to distill the writer’s art, giving it a metaphysical rather than a material heft, a poetic rather than a literalist cast. While most of “Beijing Coma” renders the protests against Communist rule with the doggedness and precision of ordinary social realism, shorter sections of the novel, describing Dai Wei’s regrets and desires with ironic nostalgia, recall the ambitious collages in which Kundera and Klíma frictionlessly juxtaposed political commentary, erotic memories, and philosophical reflections. Readers of Kundera and Josef Škvorecký would recognize the novel’s frequent invocation of sexual love as an antidote to totalitarian control, and Ma Jian shares an affinity for the artistically gifted and the emotionally vulnerable, and for social outcasts. Immersed in his memories, Dai Wei brings to mind the protagonist of Klíma’s “Love and Garbage,” a banned writer “hemmed in by prohibition” who wants to escape into a “private region of bliss.”

Born in 1953, Ma Jian is one of the Chinese artists and intellectuals who came of age in the last years of the Cultural Revolution. Exempt from personal participation in the worst excesses of Maoism, this generation, which includes China’s best-known filmmakers, Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou, as well as the artist Ai Weiwei, was the first to dare embrace the possibilities of artistic maneuver in China’s unruly transition from the “struggle session” to the free market. As the Communist Party, adopting a market economy, shed some of its ideological orthodoxy, anything seemed possible—at least, until the next crackdown.

Ma Jian seems to have hovered on the raffish end of the new countercultural spectrum—what the Sinologist John Minford termed the “culture of the liumang (an untranslatable term loosely meaning loafer, hoodlum, hobo, bum, punk).” Divorced from his first wife and abandoned by his girlfriend, Ma Jian feigned illness at work and hung out with other misfits, drinking beer and discussing “Waiting for Godot.” Accused of “spiritual pollution” by the authorities, he left Beijing in late 1983 and, travelling with a camera, a notebook, and Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass,” wandered around China for three years, subsisting on odd jobs and the kindness of friends and strangers. The commissars caught up with him in 1987, when, having just moved to Hong Kong, he published a story based on his travels in Tibet. The story, describing the degradation of China’s most religious minority, apparently spurned socialist realism’s demand for cheerful uplift, and it earned Ma Jian a blanket ban on publication in China.

On his travels across China in the mid-eighties, which he later described in “Red Dust,” the book that made him known in the West, Ma Jian repeatedly chafed at official brutality and philistinism. Speaking to a small-town book club, he proclaimed, “I will not let a political party tell me how to live, when to die or what to believe in.” Reciting Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” to a fellow-writer, he mocked Ginsberg’s angry rejection of America. “He implies his country is not fit for humans to live in. Well, he should live in China for a month, then see what he thinks. Everyone here dreams of the day we can sing out of our windows in despair.”

Tiananmen Square in early 1989 attracted many dreamers like Ma Jian, who returned from Hong Kong to a one-room shack in Beijing in order to join the student protests. The protests initially seemed like a political consummation of the previous decade of cautious economic freedom. China in the mid-eighties had been, as Ma Jian put it, “starting to shake, like a kettle coming to the boil.” “Red Dust” remains the most vivid description of the Chinese people freshly liberated from Maoism, picking their way through a transformed moral landscape in which extreme poverty and repression coexist with alluring new possibilities of self-invention. Selling chiffon scarves in a traffic jam in Xuelin or painting cartoons in Chengdu, Ma Jian not only seems to have relished his own improvised life; he also appears to have embraced some of his country’s entrepreneurial exuberance. In one of the book’s many bracingly unexpected scenes, he finds himself exhorting the residents of an isolated village, “This country is changing, opening up. You can’t just stay here like vegetables. You should travel, broaden your minds. Haven’t you heard about Shenzhen Economic Zone?”

“Beijing Coma” bathes in the poignant glow of youthful hope and excitement. It was this optimism, more than any coherent political demand or principle, that drove the protests of 1989, even inspiring ordinary workers to organize demonstrations. (Far more numerous than the students, Beijing’s protesting civilians prevented the military from reaching Tiananmen Square for days on end; they also formed a large proportion of the casualties on the night of June 3rd.) As Dai Wei puts it, “China had emerged from the catastrophe of the Cultural Revolution, and we were eager to build our country up again. We were fired by a sense of mission.” At its best, “Beijing Coma” movingly evokes the bliss many Chinese felt at that dawn to be alive, especially the young for whom the occupation of the square “was like a huge party,” with plenty of opportunities for drinking, flirtation, and sex.

The massacre at Tiananmen Square, and the additional shock of its erasure from Chinese memory, seem to have been almost as harshly clarifying for Ma Jian and his peers as the failure of the 1848 revolution in France was for Flaubert and his contemporaries. Not surprisingly, “Beijing Coma” analyzes the protests almost as fiercely as it condemns the suppressors; the student leaders, like the 1848 revolutionaries in Flaubert’s “Sentimental Education,” come across as governed by self-interest and vanity. “What was wrong with our generation?” Dai Wei says. “When the guns were pointing at our heads, we were still wasting time squabbling among ourselves.” One of the protestors tells a student leader, “You’re supposed to be fighting dictatorship, but deep down you all want to be little emperors.” Dai Wei’s girlfriend, who is one of the most passionate demonstrators, believes that the leaders “all want to run away to graduate school in America, they have no ideals.”

Ma Jian’s political anguish gives “Beijing Coma” a sour tang. Much of its prose transcends its utilitarian purpose only when, while evoking Dai Wei’s loves and his austere childhood, Ma Jian summons up some of the offhand lyricism of “Red Dust”: “I picture the dusty string of garlic hanging from a peg on the kitchen door; my father squatting down beside a washbowl, rubbing his bare legs with a wet cloth; a swathe of fallen bicycles sparkling in the sun like a field of wheat.”

The novel’s bitterness apparently derives not only from the futility of the Tiananmen protests and the abominations of the Cultural Revolution—Ma Jian uses research that raises the possibility of cannibalism among Red Guards in Guangxi—but also from what he sees as an older Chinese tendency toward autocratic cruelty, submission, and conformity. In 1997, Ai Weiwei, who is now one of China’s most famous artists, published an image of Tiananmen Square with his upraised middle finger in the foreground. In an accompanying essay, he asserted that “the history of modern China is a history of negation, a denial of the value of humanity, a murder of individuality. It is a history without a soul.” Ma Jian seems to concur. “What a gruesome history China has,” a foreign visitor to the Forbidden City remarks in “Beijing Coma.” “That’s why we’ve occupied the square,” Dai Wei’s girlfriend replies. “We want to put an end to millennia of autocratic rule.”

Reflecting on the murderous suppression of the protests, Dai Wei concludes that “we were courageous but inexperienced, and had little understanding of Chinese history.” As the bulldozers move closer to his home, and his friends and relatives abandon him, a sparrow—the humble bird once marked for extermination by Mao Zedong—becomes his constant companion. His slow decay, attended by the depredations of post-Tiananmen China, turns out to be the most accomplished part of “Beijing Coma”; the eerie fascination of an active mind inside an inert body easily compensates for the conventional consolations of plot and drama. Still, some of Ma Jian’s images and metaphors—Dai Wei’s coma, for instance, symbolizes the moral torpor of contemporary China—seem to require a more carefully rationed narrative for their fullest effect; their poetic intensity is muffled in a novel so long and crowded. As it turns out, the many students squabbling about tactics and logistics, to whom “Beijing Coma” is largely devoted, remain a blur. It is as though, having chosen a historically and emotionally resonant setting, Ma Jian felt exempted from the task of individualizing and animating his characters on the page.

The commemorative urge, in literature as in architecture, risks petrifying into the blandly monumental. Toward the end, even Dai Wei’s hyperactive consciousness feels a bit overchoreographed, his formulations (“The world I used to live in has been transformed”) as explicit as the documentary realism of the rest of the novel. What comes through most strongly and often repetitively is Ma Jian’s own alienation from his country, and while there is much to agree with in his dire prognosis for China, its very comprehensiveness feels too limiting for a novelist. A dissident writer’s pessimism, you suspect, can be as relentless and simplistic as a socialist realist’s optimism. After all, many benign impulses surely flourish under the frantic and gaudy surface of modernizing China—as the outpouring of compassion and material help for the victims of the earthquake in Sichuan shows.

In any case, China’s metamorphosis, bigger and swifter than that of nineteenth-century Europe and America, furnishes material of unsurpassed richness to its artists and writers. Ma Jian himself mined some of this in “Red Dust,” which seethes with the fraught humanity of a people lurching between credulousness and opportunism, deprivation and semi-bourgeois respectability. His new novel, however, reads like a prolonged and unhappy farewell to an irrevocably corrupted China. “If I do wake up,” Dai Wei says, “I’d probably want to forget about politics and concentrate on living a happy life.” Like many a work produced in exile, “Beijing Coma” upholds spiritual self-sufficiency against the sentimental illusions of mass politics. It also suggests that by turning away from China’s complex struggles Ma Jian will deny himself the moral passion that is the truest wellspring of his art. ♦